News

Lecture to Explore Media Impending Death Images

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Professor, media critic and former journalist Barbie Zelizer will discuss why images of people on the verge of death appear in the news and how their use affects our knowledge of world events when she delivers the Northwestern’s inaugural WCLV Lecture in Discourse, Culture and Media Studies Friday, Jan. 20.

Zelizer’s lecture, titled “From 9/11 to the Iraq War: Images of Impending Death in the News and Why They Matter,” will take place at 4 p.m. in the McCormick Tribune Center Forum, 1870 Campus Drive, on Northwestern’s Evanston campus. It is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

The Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, Zelizer is working on a new book titled “About to Die: Journalism, Memory and the Voice of the Visual.”

Zelizer is the author of “Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye.” In that book, she argues that the photographs taken at the liberation of Germany’s concentration camps after World War II not only became the basis of our memory of the Holocaust but also influenced the way images of atrocities have been presented ever since the Holocaust.

The WCLV Lecture Series in Discourse, Culture and Media Studies is supported by Robert and Jean Conrad. Robert Conrad is co-president and founder of Cleveland classical music station WCLV 104.9 FM and a graduate of Northwestern’s School of Communication. He has been the host for broadcasts of The Cleveland Orchestra for 40 years.

For further information about the upcoming lecture or the new lecture series, call (847) 491-3751 or e-mail ana-davis@northwestern.edu.